The Firebird Deception

by Dermody, Cate

  “Helen!” Reichart’s voice roared over the sound of the shot. The woman Alisha held jerked, a terrible full-body spasm that knocked Alisha backward. The sickness that had made Helen retch seemed to leap from her body into Alisha’s as they collapsed to the ground together, Helen’s weight dead in Alisha’s arms.

  Not dead, Alisha thought, cold panic around the illness in her belly. She rolled over, putting Helen on the ground, and felt for a pulse. Oh, Christ, please, not dead.

  There were shots being fired above her, around her, the sounds playing out slow and whining in suddenly distorted hearing. Helen’s chest heaved under Alisha’s hand, a desperate drag of air, and the woman’s eyes flew open. “You’re going to be okay.” Alisha’s voice cracked as she made the promise, icy fingers searching for the bullet hole beneath the blood blossoming across Helen’s shirt.

  There. Above the heart, shattering the collarbone. Alisha felt her own white smile. “It’s not a killing shot,” she whispered. “I know. I lived through the same one. You’re going to be okay. Breathe. Just breathe. I need you to breathe through the shock, Helen. You hear me?” System shock was what killed, with many gunshot wounds. Enormous violent trauma to the body too frequently shut everything down, the will to live overridden by pain and confusion. Bleeding out was a comparatively slow death. “Helen, listen to me. Breathe.” The Asian woman’s hands were waxy and cold, pained disbelief fading with the light in her eyes. “Helen, no, Jesus Christ!”

  “Alisha.” Reichart’s voice was too cold, too controlled. It betrayed pain and fury, emotions that he would never normally allow himself to show. “We have a problem.”

  Helen’s grip on Alisha’s hand relaxed as Alisha lifted her head. There was sufficient chaos in the cavern, men lying dead only a few yards away, bullet patterns splashed in the rock behind them. Brandon had neither moved from the door nor taken his hands from his pockets, looking the picture of casualness amidst the remnants of a firefight. Two others were alive and uninjured, their weapons dropped. Giving up the guns had saved their lives, Alisha judged, though she didn’t dare risk a look at Reichart to confirm it.

  Behind Brandon, picking up the lighting in the cavern and throwing it back in soft gleaming silver, waited an Attengee drone and its six-legged counterpart. Alisha instantly thought of it as the Spider, regardless of the number of legs, and felt a shiver run down her spine.

  You’re not even afraid of spiders, Leesh. What gives?

  “I’m going to give you a two-minute head start.” Brandon finally took his hand from his pocket, examining his fingernails before glancing up, disinterested.

  “And then?” Alisha wanted to force life back into the body at her feet, but instead slowly shoved her way upright, sickness pounding in her heart.

  “Then they come after you.”

  “Why bother with the chase?” Reichart’s voice was still raw, grating at Alisha’s skin. He was the rock in her existence, the one man whose emotional state couldn’t be discerned or rattled. To have his words sound like bleeding wounds made Alisha want to scream simply to break the tension of it. Instead she flexed and loosened the muscles of her thighs, preparing to drop into a dead run the moment Brandon gave the nod. She didn’t care why. It was too late for explanations. Only action could drive away the feeling of Helen’s hand growing cooler in hers, and the memory of ragged breathing that warned of death.

  Brandon’s gaze flickered to hers, and for an instant Alisha thought she saw things there. Apology. Guilt. Despair. A plea for understanding.

  All the things she hadn’t seen in Cristina’s eyes, in the moment before her partner took her own life. For the thousandth time, Alisha wondered if Cristina’s dramatic gesture had been to spare Alisha the need to pull the trigger and terminate her best friend’s existence.

  The certainty of firing the killing shot might have been easier to live with, she thought distantly, than years of questioning Cristina’s motivations.

  “Just to see what happens,” Brandon said, and Alisha knew the words for a lie.

  But she couldn’t discern the underlying truth.

  “Two minutes,” Brandon said, and Alisha ran.

  Chapter 24

  Reichart was hard on her heels, his longer legs hampered by the knife wound still healing in his thigh. Neither spoke as they burst through the cavern entrance, not needing to discuss their tactics. Alisha, still a few steps in the lead, hit the hood of the closest truck and rolled over it, landing on the far side in a crouch that allowed her to spring into the driver’s seat in the moment after she yanked the door open.

  Blessedly, unbelievably, there were keys in the ignition. She heard her own laugh skirl upward, a sharp sound of violence and rage, but the vehicle was a clutch and she forced herself to take a steadying breath as she turned it on. Flooding the engine would be their death sentence.

  Reichart was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t wait, throwing the truck in reverse and whipping around the second vehicle in the larger outer cavern. Objects in the truck’s covered bed thudded and crashed, one with the soft sound of a body. She would apologize later, if Reichart expected it. He slammed the window between the bed and the cab open and she reached for the gun he handed her without looking. Trusting, she thought. Trusting he would do his part. In the worst of it, she trusted him in a way she’d never trusted anyone else.

  Except Cristina. Alisha swore silently and pushed the thought away, firing two rounds out the window as she careened up the rocky path leading out of the caves. A better shot would have guaranteed flat tires on the second truck, but it wasn’t the mundane vehicles that were the danger. It was the drones, waiting their two minutes before remorselessly hunting down their quarry.

  One minute, twenty-eight seconds. The corrected number came into Alisha’s mind with the ease of long practice, a countdown that bordered on obsessive behavior. They might escape the Attengees. It was the Firebird that Alisha feared, its hunt unconstrained by having to keep to the earth. The only thing that might save them was that it was daylight, and Brandon might not want to risk his new prototype being seen by untrained eyes.

  Brandon. You fool, you fool, you fool, Leesh. Alisha pounded the heel of her hand on the steering wheel, squinting as the vehicle burst out of the cave mouth into a damp stream bed. Trees scraped the windshield and roof, high squeals that made chills rise on her arms. Alisha cast a glance in the side-view mirror as they ripped out of the tree cover, watching branches settle back into place, effectively hiding the cavern entrance.

  Beyond the trees was a brilliant gray sky. Damn it. Cloud cover, no matter how bright, would give Brandon confidence in sending his drones out. Smeary photographs of the silver machines would only feed stories of UFO sightings, and bring tourists through the area for a while.

  You fool, she thought again, though the heat of it was already dissipated. She’d known going in he wasn’t to be trusted, and her anger was directed more at Greg Parker’s son than at herself.

  “We need to get back to Paris.” Reichart shouldered his way through the cab window, voice still tightly wound. The window was too small for a man of his shoulder breadth to fit through easily, and Alisha heard bone cracking against metal as he was too rough with himself. Hiding one kind of pain with another, she thought.

  “I know,” she said. Reichart’s expression, reflected in the rearview mirror, tightened.

  “We’re too exposed out here. Not enough cover, too few witnesses. Too few unrelated casualties.”

  “I know.” Alisha shifted herself to the side, giving Reichart the room he needed to work his way into the cab. One minute, two seconds.

  “We can get lost more easily in Paris. You’ll need to contact Boyer, tell him the situation.”

  “I know, Frank,” Alisha said as gently as she could. “Frank, I—”

  “Don’t!” His voice cracked out, sharp and angry as he slid into the passenger-side seat. Graceful, even in pain and fury, Alisha thought. “Don’t,” he grated a second time. “D
on’t.”

  Alisha pressed her lips together, forcing herself to silence for a few seconds, until the urge to apologize had passed. Forty-three seconds. “What kind of equipment do we have back there?”

  “We’ve got the guns. The rest of it, I don’t know. Electronics. Means nothing to me.” Reichart’s voice was brittle. Alisha glanced at him, then pressed her toe against the accelerator as she folded her other leg up under herself.

  “You drive.”

  “What?”

  “Drive, Reichart. I need to assess our materials. You’re not in any condition.”

  Reichart snarled, “I’m fine,” but slid across the cab, slipping his foot under hers so the vehicle would never lose power. His hand on her hip guided her away from the driver’s seat, Alisha twisting to face the open cab window as she climbed over his lap. For an instant she found herself studying his profile, a purely selfish thought intruding: had he been this upset when he’d shot her, his fiancée, six years ago?

  Reichart gave her a sharp look. “What?”

  Twenty-five seconds, the countdown in Alisha’s head said, and she murmured, “Nothing,” as she climbed into the back of the truck.

  Electronics. Reichart was more—Alisha didn’t know what word to choose. Distressed. Infuriated—than he’d let on, and she’d known from the barely controlled rage in his voice that he was more badly hurt than she’d ever seen him before. He’d seen the control pads that could be used to program the Attengee drones. Classifying them as merely electronics now suggested he was closer to the edge of despair than Alisha had imagined.

  She crouched in the back of the truck, sightlessly stroking her fingers over a handful of the pads. They would operate on modulating frequencies, no one drone exactly attuned to more than one pad. They were intended to work as a unit, with a leader drone downloading orders and rebroadcasting them to its team. Once the objective was stated, the Attengees themselves were capable of deciding the best way to accomplish that objective. Alisha had watched them both follow a preset plan and think for themselves, sometimes reacting faster than even she could have.

  The truck hit a bump and she rounded her shoulders, irrationally afraid she would fly up and hit the bed’s roof. “Reichart.”

  “It’s the goddamned road,” he snapped. Alisha’s chin came up in surprise and she looked over her shoulder toward the cab.

  “Reichart, these aren’t just electronics. They’re drone control pads. Brandon might’ve given us the way to get out of this alive.”

  “How thoughtful of him,” Reichart sneered. Alisha pressed her lips together and turned her attention back to the pads.

  It might have been, Frank, she answered, but only silently. It was impossible that Brandon could cavalierly order a woman’s death and with the same breath offer them their only chance at survival. Wasn’t it? The keys could have been left in the ignition deliberately, the vehicles left where they could easily be stolen.

  Except Brandon had been with her when the trucks were parked, and if the drone’s masters had been confident of their triumph, they would have had no reason to take precautions against either the trucks or the control pads being stolen.

  You’re still looking for ways to trust him, Leesh. Alisha spoke over her shoulder again, for once in accordance with Reichart’s sarcasm regarding Brandon. “It doesn’t matter. The good news is we’ve got the means to control a dozen of their Attengees.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Once, the question would have been infused with humor. Now Reichart only sounded as if he was waiting for the next blow to fall. Alisha dropped her chin to her chest, a wave of defeat sweeping her.

  “They operate on different frequencies and there’s no guarantee the ones that’ll be coming after us will respond to any of these pads.”

  “Do something about it,” Reichart said shortly. Alisha stared at his shoulder—the only part of him easily visible—then turned back to the pads, spreading them across the truck bed.

  “Keep an eye on the sky,” she muttered, just loud enough for Reichart to hear over the truck’s rumbles. “The Firebird will be the first to reach us, and I don’t have a control pad for it. It must be in the other truck.”

  “Too bad you didn’t look before you decided which one to steal,” Reichart snapped back.

  “I’ll try to be more careful next time.” Alisha put no rancor in the response, knowing he lashed out to release pain and frustration. She shared the impulse, but kept it quenched. Bad enough that Reichart was distraught. Should she give in to her own anger and fear, they’d lose whatever edge they might have. “You have somewhere in Paris we can go? A safe house?”

  Silence answered her, and then a growled curse. “I know a hotel.”

  Alisha nodded, breathing, “Please be awake,” as she dug into her filthy jeans pocket and came out with the little silver communicator Erika had given her. Her first impulse—tapping its surface—got no telltale chirp of activation. Despite the past harrowing minutes, Alisha found a crooked smile to give the piece as she turned it over, looking for the way to turn it on.

  A button too subtle to be accidentally depressed marred the device’s back. Alisha pushed her fingernail against it, feeling it give a subtle click, and turned the communicator over again. “Erika? Hello?”

  “Who the hell are you talking to?”

  “Just drive, Reichart.” Alisha gnawed her lower lip, palming the triangle and bringing it closer to her mouth. “E? You there?” She mumbled a curse when there was no response, then tapped the gleaming surface impatiently. “E?”

  The comm unit gave an entirely familiar chirrup that made Alisha lose her balance with surprised laughter. “Oh my God, she’s going to get in so much trouble. That’s got to be copyrighted, or something.”

  This time, “What the hell?” came from two voices: Reichart in the front seat, and Erika’s sleep-heavy grumble over the comm. The latter cleared slightly, though the next question was broken with a yawn. “Alisha? Is that you?”

  “Hi, E. Sorry to wake you up.”

  “Liar. What do you need? And I got the sound off a cell phone ring, anyway. It’s legal. What do you think I am, some kind of pirate? Arr,” she added, somewhat compulsively.

  “Arr,” Alisha agreed. “How would I get an Attengee control panel to broadcast on all the Attengee frequencies at once?”

  “You’d need the master board,” Erika said with another yawn. “Or a resident genius.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you, Erika. You’re sure this thing can’t be traced?”

  “Of course it can be traced. Everything can be traced. But it uses a low-level subharmonic frequency that nobody except whales listens to.”

  “Whales?”

  “Does it really matter right now? Look, you have a control pad? Not a master one, but at least one?”

  “I’ve got nine,” Alisha said, feeling an out-of-place burst of triumph at the admission.

  “I’m sure I don’t want to know how you got nine, eh?” Erika said. “You have anything to record the frequencies with?”

  “Even if I did, I don’t think I’d recognize it.”

  “Well, shit, Ali, you’ve got to give me something to work with. I’m going to have to…” Her voice trailed off, leaving Alisha deliberately twitching muscle groups as an exercise to keep herself from blurting out demands to her distant friend. “All right, look,” Erika muttered a minute later.

  “We’ve got company,” Reichart said from the front seat. Alisha closed her eyes and swore.

  “This really needs to work the first time, Erika.”

  “You Mission: Impossible types,” Erika said. “Always with the emergencies. All right, look. Turn on all the pads. I’ll give you the command line to type in and with any luck it’ll overload the system and everything will respond on one frequency for about thirty seconds.”

  “With any luck?”

  “You want flawless genius, you call me with the frequency codes. I’m working from memory here, so I
can’t guarantee it’ll be right.”

  “Your memory is better than most people’s solid facts.”

  “That’s your best guess,” Erika corrected sotto voce. Alisha frowned at the comm, and as if Erika could see it, the other woman said, “Never mind. Ready?”

  “God, I hope so.”

  The string of letters and backslashes that Erika rattled off meant absolutely nothing to Alisha, who found herself shaking her head as she typed them in. “I thought the Attengee’s strength was that it could be programmed in plain English, E.”

  Erika snorted. “Its objectives can be, but you really want somebody to be able to rewrite all your source code in plain English? They’d be able to turn the drones around and send them back at you. What’s happening?”

  “All my handhelds blipped,” Alisha reported. She heard Erika’s hands clap together.

  “Rock on, dude. Try your shutdown procedure now. If it works, the shutdown should be on a different frequency, so they’re going to have to look for the right one to start ’em up again. You’ll have some more time, at least.”

  “Shutdown sequence initiated,” Alisha said beneath her breath, then lifted her voice. “Reichart?”

  “You’re with Reichart?” Erika’s voice brightened with interest. “What’s going on, Ali?”

  “Firebird’s still coming, Alisha.” Reichart’s voice rose with strain.

  “Fuck,” Alisha said. “Wrong code, E.”

  “You didn’t say anything about a Firebird! Shit, Alisha, I haven’t even gotten to play with one of those yet! Goddamn it. Look, I’ll call you back.” Erika’s vowels went long, a sure sign of her frustration as her Upper Peninsula accent came out. The comm blooped again and Alisha was left staring at it helplessly.

  “Alisha,” Reichart repeated.

  Alisha twisted around to watch the Firebird soar in front of their truck, thrusters firing blue-white flame as it paced them, a few dozen yards ahead.

  Chapter 25